27 February 2008

/shakefist Time-Warner

I turned on my HD cable box/DVR to find that Time-Warner had automatically downloaded new software to it that, among other things, has a new UI.

I haven't messed around with any options yet, but my biggest complaint is...... it erased all of my scheduled recordings for the DVR!

Well, all of the ones that won't be on in the two-week program guide. Unfortunately, this includes most of the shows that were prematurely canceled/postponed this season (i.e. The Office, Heroes). It also somehow transformed my recording of Star Trek: The Next Generation (which was taken off of Spike a while ago) into Star Trek: Voyager. Sub par.

I have to say, this is quite inconvenient and I'm a little disappointed. Even the new menu fading is really annoying.

On the plus side, they got rid of those nasty gray filler bands when watching standard programming on an HDTV. That's about the only thing that I've seen that I like. Next time, Time-Warner, at the very least warn me. Preferably, give me an option.

Being involved in the TWC engineering organization at one point of my history, I can vouch for the fact that there is never enough consideration of customer impact when they make such major changes. They could be so much greater if they would just spend the time.

After all, warning customers of the possibility of losing data isn't too much to expect? If anything, it's the minimal expectation!

So, after the horribly unintuitive irritation of trying to set up a new series recording to replace the one deleted in the software push, I decided to give Time-Warner a call.

Yeah, that was next to worthless.

I talked with Cindy and her supervisor Brandon who mentioned that there were mailers and calls that went out (I received neither). It was apparently a known issue that scheduled recordings would be deleted but what surprised me the most was that they were OK with that.

In my corner of the software business, things like that aren't acceptable.